Race is the easiest card to play in SA.
Whether it’s a black South African accusing a white South African of racism, or a white South African accusing a black South African of playing the race card when faced with difficult questions about their conduct.
And it always lands on fertile ground in a polarised SA, where issues such as race, inequality and redress bring up myriad emotions across the race groups.
It was disappointing this week to see Eskom, the country’s troubled state-owned power utility, get preoccupied with this pastime at a critical time when energy security should be high on the agenda.
Eskom’s board this week issued a statement that it would appoint an independent investigation into an allegation by suspended CPO Solly Tshitangano that his boss, CEO Andre de Ruyter, had shown racial bias in the handling of issues related to black- and white-owned service providers.
Tshitangano came to Eskom in 2018 as part of a new executive team at Megawatt Park that was tasked with undoing the damage from decades of corruption, leadership ineptitude and general malfeasance.
His arrival was not met with happiness by all inside Eskom for a reason: as a former acting chief procurement officer at the National Treasury many would have been familiar with his red compliance pen that frustrated their attempts to siphon money out of Eskom or engage in procurement that was not well thought out and was not in the best interest of the fiscus.
If Tshitangano’s arrival would have been unwelcome, De Ruyter’s arrival almost two years later in January 2020 was met with sheer hostility, as it marked a critical step in the government’s attempt to rid the state company of lazy and corrupt elements.
His predecessor Phakamani Hadebe was literally taken out of Megawatt Park in a stretcher as the pressure and hostility of undercutting decades of corruption networks inside the entity took a toll on his health.
For the record De Ruyter and his supporters at the energy supplier cite his appointment of a black company secretary and several other black executives as reasons why he cannot be racist. They argue De Ruyter was attacked as a proxy for what has come to be known as the RET forces’ fight against his boss, public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan.
Tshitangano’s case for De Ruyter’s racism, laid out in several letters to board chair Gordhan and President Cyril Ramaphosa, is that he was quick to blacklist a black oil supplier, Econ Oil, which was accused, and not yet convicted, of irregularly and corruptly winning a multibillion-rand tender.
This is all while white-owned multinationals, who had on some level admitted to actual corruption in Eskom’s diabolical build programmes, simply had to pay back the money and continue to get work at Eskom.
Tshitangano also accused his boss of usurping powers he did not have, appointing key executives without the required board concurrence, introducing contractors outside Eskom processes and chairing executive committee meetings that resolved matters that had no written submissions.
The detail of some of these allegations is that De Ruyter conferred decision-making powers to his newly set up divisional boards months before Eskom’s board procedurally conferred them, and that he suspended Econ Oil’s contract before embarking on an investigation to find out whether they were guilty of not.
These allegations remain uninvestigated more than a year since he referred them to Makgoba.
His predecessor Phakamani Hadebe was literally taken out of Megawatt Park on a stretcher as the pressure and hostility of undercutting decades of corruption networks inside the entity took a toll on his health.
Tshitangano is on suspension, and is facing a disciplinary hearing where he will stand up to no less than 15 charges related to his failing to meet a savings target of R2bn at the end of the last financial year. Word in Eskom’s corridors of power is that the board believes his allegations against De Ruyter are due to his challenges at work.
Eskom’s board this week announced that it would commission an independent investigation into allegations of racism against De Ruyter.
It said the allegation “not only brings Eskom into disrepute, but it also threatens to detract and distract the focus of the executive team and the GCE in particular from their critical job of restoring Eskom to operational and financial sustainability”.
What is equally distracting though is why, out of numerous equally serious allegations against Eskom’s top executive, it chooses to investigate racism. Surely, if the allegations made by Tshitangano are without basis as the board claims, it has not put those matters to rest.
This is especially critical if some of these decisions – such as action against Econ Oil before they are pronounced guilty by any platform – could have repercussions for the state-owned entity.
It would need a legal opinion, for instance, to determine whether any decision taken by Eskom’s divisional boards before the board resolved to empower them would be considered binding.
Eskom is still yet to determine how contractor Werner Mouton – the man De Ruyter introduced – could have worked and produced a report months before he actually signed a contract to work for the power utility. In his defence De Ruyter argues Mouton has saved the company up to R800m.
But Eskom’s board would rather investigate allegations of racism because that’s what SA loves. Or is it because that is the only allegation it is confident can be defeated?
Thus their decision to investigate only racism claims is disappointing not because race matters less, but because doing it in this manner fails to get to the bottom of a very public fallout between two critical components of the Eskom turnaround.
Results matter, but the manner in which one gets there matters even more in a country where wolves are prone to dress themselves in sheep skin.
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